Chapter 20
In This Chapter
Saving time and keystrokes
Autocorrecting
Viewing the iPad’s capacity
Scrubbing audio
Working with links and email addresses
Sharing the love … and the links
Choosing a home page for Safari
Storing files
Making phone calls
Snapping the screen
After spending a lot of quality time with our iPads, it’s only natural that we’ve discovered more than a few helpful hints, tips, and shortcuts. In this chapter, we share our faves.
Keyboard shortcuts are a way to have your iPad automatically type a phrase when you type the shortcut. For example, when we type vty followed by the spacebar, our iPads type Very truly yours. We typed a 3-letter shortcut, and our iPads replaced it with a 14-letter phrase in the blink of an eye. Figure 20-1 shows some more examples.
How long would it take you to type Dictated to and scent from my iPad; please blame Siri for any missed type ohs on your iPad’s on-screen keyboard? And would you type it without mistakes? It took a fraction of a second to type our shortcut for this phrase (dict), and another fraction of a second for the iPad to expand it (to Dictated to and scent from my iPad; please blame Siri for any missed type ohs).
So, shortcuts save you time and keystrokes.
Another advantage is that you’ll always spell things correctly (as long as you spell them correctly when you create the shortcut and phrase). You can even use shortcuts to automatically correct the spelling of words you commonly mistype. Say you often type taht when you mean to type that. Here’s how to create, edit, and enjoy your iPad’s convenient little keystroke savers. Start by creating a shortcut:
After you create a shortcut, just tap its name to change (edit) it.
After you create and edit ’em, here’s how you use ’em:
To insert a phrase, type its keyboard shortcut. Say the shortcut is cty, which is one of the shortcuts shown in Figure 20-1. If you stop after you type y, the phrase appears in the middle of the QuickType suggestions, as shown in Figure 20-2. To insert the phrase, press Return or the space bar, type a punctuation mark after the y, or tap the QuickType suggestion; to ignore it, just continue typing.
One last thing: You can use the same technique to create keyboard shortcuts like this on an iPhone or iPod touch. Although you can’t easily sync or share your shortcuts, you can create and use them on any device running iOS 5 or later.
Here are three related tips about autocorrection that can also help you type faster and more accurately.
First, know that you can type dont to get to don’t, and cant to get to can’t. We’ve told you to put some faith in the iPad’s autocorrection software, and that advice applies to contractions. In other words, save time by letting the iPad’s intelligent keyboard insert the apostrophes on your behalf for these and other common words.
In a similar vein, if you ever need to type an apostrophe (for example, when you want to type it’s), you don’t need to visit the punctuation and numeric keyboard. Instead, press down on the exclamation mark/comma key until a blue apostrophe appears on the key, and then lift your finger. Presto — you’ve typed an apostrophe without switching to the punctuation and numeric keyboard and back.
If the autocorrection suggestion isn’t the word you want, instead of ignoring it, reject it. Finish typing the word and then tap the x to reject the suggestion before you type another word. Doing so makes your iPad more likely to accept your word the next time you type it and less likely to make the same incorrect suggestion again.
Here you thought you were buying a tech book, and you get grammar and typing lessons thrown in at no extra charge. Just think of us as full-service authors.
Some people don’t care for autocorrect and turn it off. If you hate it too, here’s how to get rid of it: Tap Settings⇒General⇒Keyboard and tap the Auto-Correction switch to off (green).
When your iPad is selected in iTunes, you see a colorful chart at the bottom of the screen that tells you how your media and other data use your iPad’s capacity.
By default, the chart shows the amount of free space on your iPad, along with colored bands that represent the audio, video, photo, apps, documents, books, and such on your iPad. What you may not know is that when you hover your pointer over the chart, an overlay appears with the number of items of that type that are stored on your iPad, and how much space those items consume in megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB), as shown in Figure 20-3 for books.
Here’s the situation: You’re listening to a podcast or an audiobook and trying to find the beginning of a specific segment by moving the scrubber bar — the little red line representing the playhead — left and right. The only problem is that the scrubber bar isn’t precise, and your fat finger keeps moving it too far one way or the other. Never fear — your iPad has a wonderful (albeit somewhat hidden) fix. Just press your finger on the scrubber, but instead of sliding your finger to the left or right, slide it downward toward the bottom of the screen, as shown in Figure 20-4.
As you slide downward, the scrubbing speed changes like magic, and the scrubber bar moves in finer and finer increments. The speed is displayed below the scrubber bar (the figure displays quarter-speed scrubbing). Slide your finger downward an inch or until you see High-Speed Scrubbing, which is about 75 percent of the normal scrubbing speed. Continue dragging downward in 1-inch increments or so and the speed changes to half-speed, quarter-speed, and very fine scrubbing.
This scrub trick is easier to do than to explain, so give it a try.
When the iPad encounters an email address (such as [email protected]) or a URL (such as http://www.websitename.com or www.websitename.com) in an email message, it makes that text appear as a blue link on your screen. If you tap that link, the iPad launches Safari or Mail, and starts a new email message for an email address or takes you to the appropriate web page for a URL. So don’t bother with copy and paste if you don’t have to — tap those blue links, and the right thing will happen every time.
Here’s another cool Safari trick: If you press and hold down on a link rather than tapping it, a little floating text bubble appears and shows you the underlying URL. In addition, it offers the following options, as shown in Figure 20-5:
Here’s one more Safari trick: If you press and hold down on most images, a Save Image option appears (see Figure 20-6). Tap Save Image, and the picture is saved to the camera roll on the Albums tab of the Photos app. Tap Copy, and the image is copied to the Clipboard so that you can paste it into an email message or document created in another app (such as Apple’s Pages or Keynote). Note that if the image is a link to another web page, you’ll see these options: Open, Open in New Tab, Add to Reading List, and Copy.
Type a short message body (or don’t), supply your pal’s email or iMessage address if necessary, and then tap the Send or Post button.
You may have noticed that the iPad version of Safari, unlike the Mac and PC versions of Safari (as well as every other common web browser), doesn’t have an option to specify a home page. Instead, when you tap the Safari icon, you return to the last site you visited.
You can, however, create a web clip, or an icon for the page you want to use as your home page. Here’s how to do it:
An icon that will open this page appears on your Home screen (or one of your Home screens if you have more than one).
Safari opens to your home page instead of the last page you visited.
Consider moving the Safari icon from the dock to one of your Home screens so that you never tap it by accident. Finally, remember that the dock has room for six icons, even though it has only four by default.
A tiny Massachusetts software company — Ecamm Network — sells a piece of OS X software, PhoneView ($29.95), which lets you copy files from your Mac to your iPad and copy files from the iPad to a Mac, as shown in Figure 20-9. (No Windows version is available.) Better still, you can try the program for a week before deciding whether you want to buy it. Go to www.ecamm.com to fetch the free demo.
The big deal here is that while automatic backups protect most of the files on your iPad, you can’t manipulate them. They’re backed up and restored, but heaven help you if you want to extract one or more individual iMessages, specific songs, videos, notes, or other types of data from your iPad. The bottom line is that there’s no easier way than PhoneView.
In a nutshell, here’s how PhoneView works. After downloading the software to your Mac, double-click the program’s icon to start it. Then do one of the following:
If you need access to the files on your iPad or if you want to use your iPad as a pseudo–hard drive, PhoneView is a bargain.
Many people, including us, have compared the iPad to an iPhone on steroids. Only the iPad isn’t actually a phone. But don’t let that stop you from making or even receiving phone calls on the tablet.
Come again?
You read right. You can make and even receive phone calls on your iPad. After all, two of the key components to calling are built into the iPad: a speaker and a microphone.
If you have an iPhone 5 or newer and a 4th-generation iPad or newer, both running iOS 8 or later, you have everything you need. To make a phone call on your iPad, just tap a phone number in Contacts, Calendar, or Safari, or tap a recent contact in the multitasking screen.
If you meet the requirements and still can’t make calls, go to Settings⇒FaceTime and turn on iPhone Cellular Calls. Conversely, if you hate this feature and want to disable it, go to Settings⇒FaceTime and turn off iPhone Cellular Calls.
But wait! There’s more! You can make and receive calls even if your devices aren’t the latest and greatest. Just head to the App Store to fetch the third component: Instead of an iPhone, you’ll need an app that takes advantage of VOIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol. In plain-speak, that means turning the iPad into a giant iPhone. And yes, you can find more than one app to do the trick.
We’ve checked out Line2, Skype, and Truphone, all of which have a version designed to take advantage of the large iPad screen. The apps themselves are free, although you have to pay for calls to regular phones. Here are the details:
True confession: We threw in this final tip because, well, it helps people like us. Permit us to explain. We hope you’ve admired the pictures of the iPad screens that are sprinkled throughout this book. We also secretly hope that you’re thinking what marvelous photographers we must be.
Well, the fact is, we couldn’t take a blurry picture of the iPad using its built-in (and little-known) screen-grab feature if we wanted to.
Press the sleep/wake button at the same time you press the Home button, but just for an instant. The iPad grabs a snapshot of whatever is on the screen.
The picture lands in the camera roll of the Photos app. From there, you can synchronize it with your Mac or PC, along with all your other pictures, or email it to yourself or anyone else. And from there, the possibilities are endless. Why, your picture could wind up just about anywhere, including in a For Dummies book.